Rio’s Olympic Golf Course Is Littered With Deadly Animals

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I’ve played a few hellish courses in my day. They weren’t hellish due to their difficulty. At least, they weren’t designed to be difficult. However, kicking Natty Light cans off of every tee box does mess with the mental side of a golfer’s game.

We won’t be seeing beer cans on the course in Rio, but if the golfers manage to navigate their way through the gunfire and criminals unscathed, they can expect to face off with some of South America’s most interesting (and sometimes terrifying) animals. Just another obstacle thrown into an already unprecedented olympic games.

The Golf Channel recently explored the Olympic golf course in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood of Rio, an upscale region nestled on the lakefront. While that makes for a picturesque setting, it also means the grassy slopes are a veritable Noah’s Ark of Brazilian wildlife.

Spotted so far on the links are: sloths, caimans, boa constrictors, mico monkeys, burrowing owls and 40 capybaras, the largest rodents in the world.

The 150-pound rodents are native to South America and no small obstacle.

“They chew down on the grass at night,” Mark Johnson, director of international agronomy for the PGA Tour, told The National Post. “There are about 30-40 of them inside the course perimeter, but they live here and we play golf here. We co-exist.”

A day may not go by in which I don’t bitch about the craphole, goatranch university-owned golf course that I call home, but its litter-filled fairways and cancerous water hazards are much more enticing than even the thought of encountering a boa. Absolutely not a chance in hell my Hanes would make it out of that experience without resembling a damn molten chocolate factory.

More power to those that chose to go represent our nation, but if they manage to escape with their lives, Zika-free, and not an ounce of flesh lost to whatever the hell lives just outside of those golf course boundaries, consider them true modern miracles..

So, outside of a gigantic rodent, the only thing dangerous to humans is a caiman, and those are barely more dangerous than some of the gators in the southern US. Sounds like an oasis in that shithole of a city.